Sounding the Future 

Overview

What role might art play in the future? And forget what it would look like — what might it sound like? It's an unusual question, and one that this upcoming exhibition at UTS Gallery seeks to engage with.

Featuring artists Gail Priest, Pia van Gelder and Tom Smith, Peter Blamey, and George Poonkhin Khut, Sounding the Future presents "dreams of future soundings", with artists developing their own response to the show's posed question. Engaging with the sense of sound rather than sight for inspiration, their works combine artistic imagination with the considerations of degraded environmental conditions, new technologies, and the possibility of a future world devoid of human life.

If that sounds a little bleak, fret not: the future of art doesn't necessarily mean an absence of it (or artists). Featured artist and show curator Priest explains that hope lies within the show, and within art itself, despite the at times grim environmental, economic and social future scenarios imagined by the exhibition.

"The artworks show ways to negotiate these territories, often to transcend these conditions spiritually. Of course this could be seen as escapism, but for me art reminds us of the values of humanity that are worth keeping and fostering."

Image: Gail Priest, Sounding the Future, installation view, 2015. Photo: Samuel James